How to be a Woman – by Caitlin Moran

I’ve always enjoyed following Caitlin Moran on Twitter so I picked this up in a charity shop to try out. Essentially it’s her autobiography from puberty onwards, crossed with a book about Feminism.

She writes in a way that’s very easy to read, she’s fun and chatty, though some of her descriptions of puberty got a little graphic in places!

That said, I really disagree with a good chunk of what she’s trying to say – I’m not anti-feminist as such, but on specific topics like abortion and porn, I definitely disagreed.

I’m not looking to start a whole debate on here, but just to pick up on one point – in her chapter on abortion she says the following:

“I cannot understand anti-abortion arguments that centre on the sanctity of life. As a species, we’ve fairly comprehensively demonstrated that we don’t believe in the sanctity of life. The shrugging acceptance of war, famine, epidemic, pain and life-long grinding poverty show us that, whatever we tell ourselves, we’ve made only the most feeble of efforts to really treat human life as sacred.”

That just makes no sense to me – yes we don’t deal with some of those things as we should, but we agree that they’re wrong and bad. They’re all things I’m against, this argument doesn’t line up at all.

Definitely an interesting read to get you thinking, but not one that has earned a permanent spot on my bookshelf.